Charon's claw

NOT QUITE THE UNDERDARK…

Dahlia brought her hand over her face as she splashed down into the shallow water outside the metal grate. “We’re crawling through that?” she asked with disgust.

Before her crouched Artemis Entreri, tugging at one of the bent bars to move it to the side. He had almost created a large enough opening for them to squeeze through.

Beside her, Drizzt understood her reluctance, for the smell was indeed overwhelming, wafting out on visible gases escaping the dark tunnel.

“We need not,” he said to her, and he nodded his chin to the north. “We could take the road to Luskan instead. Or past Luskan to Ten-Towns, though we’d not beat the onset of winter in Icewind Dale.”

“Or the eastern road to Mithral Hall,” Dahlia retorted, clearly not amused.

The bar came free in Entreri’s hand, which seemed to surprise him. He stared at its rusted end, then tossed it aside to splash into the water. He crouched lower and washed his hands in the salty liquid. “Decide now,” he said. “This way lies Alegni.”

Dahlia pushed past him and hopped up into the tunnel on her bare knees, then quickly rose into a standing crouch as she glanced back at the other two. “Light a torch,” she instructed.

“It will blow up in your face,” Entreri replied with a derisive snort.

“We’ll need a light source,” Dahlia argued, because she needed to say something at that point. Artemis Entreri had just gained the upper hand on her, had just diminished her in front of Drizzt. Dahlia could not let that stand.

“I came through without one,” the assassin replied glibly, and Dahlia could only scowl.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at the man, but Drizzt drew forth Twinkle. The magical sword answered his call and glowed a soft blue-white hue. The drow hopped up into the tunnel and squeezed past Dahlia, the blade out before him, dimly lighting the way.

Cut unevenly through the stone, the sewer was sometimes high enough for Drizzt and the others to stand straight, but often they crouched as they moved along. The floor was concave, lower in the center, and a flow of dark water trickled past, sometimes pooling ankle deep or even past their knees, which was quite alarming. Everywhere, just at the edges of their vision, critters slithered or crawled or scurried aside.

At first the sword light seemed meager, but as they got deeper into the tunnel system-a maze of angles, turns, and indistinguishable stones-and the daylight receded behind them, Twinkle’s glow seemed brighter by far. More rats huddled in the shadows at the side of the tunnel, more snakes slithered away into the water, and a multitude of insects, flying and stinging and spidery things hanging on slight webs, looked on.

None of the three spoke the obvious truth: the sword could illuminate a few feet around them, but to someone or something far away, it no doubt shined like a warning beacon.

Drizzt, born and raised in the near lightless Underdark, was most conscious of this, of course. A drow carrying a light source in the corridors around Menzoberranzan would soon enough be murdered and robbed. Holding the glowing blade now was anathema to everything he had learned as a young warrior. With his superior vision, he could navigate these tunnels well enough without the glow.

“I can see in the dark,” Entreri said behind him, surprising him, and he turned on the man.

“You wore a cat’s eye circlet,” Drizzt agreed, and he held up Twinkle, confirming that Entreri was not wearing any such thing at that time.

“Innate now,” the assassin explained. “A gift from Jarlaxle.”

Drizzt nodded and moved to sheathe the sword, but Dahlia caught his arm. He looked at her curiously, and she shook her head, her face a mask of discomfort.

“I don’t like snakes and I don’t like spiders,” she said. “If you sheathe that, then know that you’ll be carrying me.”

That brought a laugh from Entreri, but a brief one, as Dahlia, deadly serious, fixed him with a glare telling him in no uncertain terms that he was crossing a dangerous line.

Drizzt started away, and Dahlia splashed along behind him. “A gentleman would carry me,” she muttered under her breath.

“Because you’re such a lady?” Entreri asked from behind.

Up in front, Drizzt stopped and took a deep breath. An image of the two locked in a passionate embrace flitted through his thoughts and he nearly growled aloud as he dismissed it.

With the light of Twinkle leading the way, the trio moved farther along the main passageway, and soon enough came to a honeycomb network of more impressive and hand-worked side tunnels. They knew that they were underneath the outskirts of the city-the old city, at least. Their choices were limited at first, for these were still much smaller tunnels, almost all impassable and with a couple that they might have traversed by belly-crawling… something none of them wanted. But a short while after that, they came to a network of passages larger still, many as navigable as the one they now traveled and a couple even larger than that.

“Do you remember the way?” Drizzt asked Entreri. He whispered the words, for other sounds echoed across the wet and slimy stones.

Entreri moved up beside the drow, who stood at a five-way intersection, and surveyed the area. Hands on hips, he at last shook his head. “It was long ago.”

“Not so long,” Dahlia argued, clearly impatient.

Both Entreri and Drizzt looked at the elf woman.

“When I last came through here, I simply followed the water’s flow,” he explained. “I cared for that which was before me, not behind.”

“You would have been far cleverer had you marked your passing, or at least, had you returned and mapped it after you had escaped,” Dahlia continued.

Entreri stared at her hard. “I didn’t intend on returning through this route. Ever.”

Dahlia waved at him dismissively. “You disappoint me,” she said. “A true warrior always prepares.”

Drizzt studied Entreri closely, expecting the man to explode and to fall over Dahlia in a murderous rage. But he just stood there, staring at her for a bit longer, before turning back to face Drizzt and look to the tunnels once more. “Left, I would guess,” he said. “The river is to our left and I entered the sewers along its bank. It is the source of the running water that flushes these passages, and so…”

“Flushes?” Dahlia prodded a thick pile of muck and feces with the half-staff she carried, her face a mask of disgust.

The pile shifted aside and out from under it came a serpent, black and thick and coiled, and easily as long as Dahlia was tall. It flew out from its position, lifting into the air, so fierce was its strike at Dahlia.

Dahlia recoiled and tried to fall away as the snapping toothy maw closed for her face.

A descending line of light flashed before her, but more importantly to her at that time, the bulk of the snake crashed into her. How she screamed and thrashed! All discipline flew from her as she worked purely in reaction to get that horrid thing away from her. And even after it fell aside, it took the woman quite a few heartbeats to sort it all out, to realize that she had not been bitten, to understand that the light marked the descent of Drizzt’s scimitar, and that she had been met by nothing more than the snake’s headless body flying from momentum and thrashing in its death throes.

Drizzt grabbed Dahlia and held her arms by her sides, trying to calm her as Entreri walked by.

“Did it pierce me? Am I poisoned?” she asked over and over again.

“Perhaps, and no,” Entreri answered, and both looked at him, and Dahlia’s face crinkled with disgust. He held the severed snake head, stuck on the end of his sword. “It is a constrictor, not a venomous serpent,” he said. “It won’t kill you with a bite, but would wrap you instead and crush the breath out of you, all the while trying to swallow the top of your head.”

Now it was Drizzt’s turn to flash a glare at Entreri. “It is-was not poisonous,” he said calmly. “And it did not bite you, in any case.”

That seemed to steady Dahlia a bit more. She kicked the thick, strong body of the snake farther away from her, and the body jerked spasmodically once more. Dahlia gasped and hopped away.

“You really don’t like snakes, do you?” Entreri said, and he flicked his blade, launching the snake head far away. He walked back past Drizzt and Dahlia. “Come along, then. The sooner we are out of these smelly sewers, the better.”

Neither Dahlia nor Drizzt was about to argue with that statement and they rushed to catch up, Drizzt again taking the lead-but this time, Dahlia stood right beside him.

Entreri handed her the other half of Kozah’s Needle. Dahlia looked at it doubtfully, not taking it.

“If it serves as we had hoped, then it has shown me no contact by Charon’s Claw in the time I have carried it,” he explained. “If the sword has sought me and found me, then your weapon didn’t notice. Either way, better for you to be armed now.”

“What do you know?” Dahlia asked.

“That,” Drizzt answered, and when Dahlia and Entreri turned to him, he thrust his sword out before him, and in the light farther along the tunnel, more snakes writhed, some taking to the water, some crawling over others, and all looking back at them.

“Let’s leave this place,” Dahlia said.

“We’re trying to do just that,” Entreri reminded.

“Back the way we came,” Dahlia insisted. She joined the ends of Kozah’s Needle back together, forming a singular eight-foot length. It wasn’t very practical for fighting in a narrow tunnel, of course, but when Dahlia stabbed the staff diagonally into the water before her, Drizzt understood that she wanted her weapon to keep these slithering creatures as far from her as possible.

“They’re not poisonous,” Entreri replied. “They know they cannot swallow us and have no means to kill us. They’ll likely retreat.”

“Like the first one?” Dahlia sarcastically replied, and she backed down the corridor a few steps.

“You startled it. It attacked out of fear,” Drizzt answered. He was a ranger, and well versed in the ways of the wilds. He moved forward-or started to, until a serpent threw itself through the air at him. Up flashed his arm to block, and he intercepted the snake’s opened maw closing on his forearm, grabbing tight, its body immediately slapping around his torso as it tried to gain a hold and begin its crushing squeeze.

The strength of the creature surprised the drow, its every muscle working in perfect coordination. Noting movement to the side, he glanced at Entreri, at first thinking that the assassin was rushing to his aid. Not so, he understood, when he realized that Entreri had his own problems.

On came the strangely aggressive snakes, slithering through the water, sliding along the walls, throwing themselves through the air.

With a growl, Drizzt lifted his bitten left arm, extending the snake out before his right shoulder, turned and wriggled enough to free his other arm, and brought a quick backhand of Twinkle to cut the creature in half. Immediately, the lower torso loosened around him and dropped with a splash to the floor, but that head held on, stubbornly. Too concerned with drawing his other blade-a bit awkwardly since Icingdeath, which he usually carried in his right hand, was sheathed on his left hip-Drizzt let the half-serpent hang there.

His focus remained before him, as it had to, slapping, slashing, and kicking to fend off the onslaught.

Beside him, Entreri worked with equal fury, his dirk swiftly deflecting leaping serpents, his sword scoring kills.

But behind them, there came a long series of dull raps, and in one of the infrequent moments of pause, Drizzt glanced back, as did Entreri, to see Dahlia straddling the water, her staff presented horizontally before her and she rapidly shifted it up and down, out left and out right, cracking it against the stone walls.

“Hit the snakes, you idiot!” Entreri yelled at her, and he was nearly toppled at the end of that sentence as one of the serpents slithered through his defenses and wrapped around his legs, tugging him powerfully.

“Dahlia!” Drizzt implored her.

But the rapping continued and so did the onslaught of serpents-there seemed to be no end to them! Entreri freed himself only to get hit again, and Drizzt nearly had Icingdeath pulled from his grasp when one snake took hold.

The corridor began to flash, not from the waving of Drizzt’s glowing scimitar, but with sharp spikes of light, crackles of lightning.

Entreri kept cursing at Dahlia and growling at the snakes, and swinging and stabbing and kicking. And just when Drizzt thought he had gained some measure of momentum, a serpent appeared on the ceiling before him. He threw himself back and low into a crouch and the snapping jaws rent the air, just missing his left ear. The snake retracted before his blade could decapitate it, then threw itself at him, slamming him hard and nearly knocking him from his feet.

To fall was to be overwhelmed, Drizzt knew. The water shimmied, alive with serpents.

“Dahlia!” he cried for help.

This time she answered him, not with words, but with thunder. She thrust Kozah’s Needle through the water to slam against the floor, and there she released the energy her rapping had imbued within it. The retort jolted all three of them into the air, though all three held their footing as they landed. The water churned and sizzled, a stinky steam lifting from it so thickly that it obscured their vision.

Drizzt tried to respond, to say something, but found his jaw clenched from the energy pulsing through him.

Then it was over, as unexpectedly and abruptly as it had happened, and an eerie stillness replaced the fury of the previous moments.

Snakes dropped from the walls and ceiling, or hung in place, their lengths looped over a natural beam or a jag or jut. Snakes lay on the floor in various poses, like living runes or glyphs. Snakes floated in the water, sliding down to bump against a leg or foot.

Perhaps dead, perhaps stunned. That latter, very real possibility had Drizzt more than a little alarmed.

Beside him, Entreri slashed down on one reptile, and its convulsion as his blade struck home told the ranger that it had indeed been alive until cleaved.

“Be gone, and quickly!” Drizzt cried. “Leave them, there are too many!”

“Out the way we came!” Dahlia said.

“Alegni is that way,” Entreri reminded, pointing ahead. “And it’s shorter.”

They didn’t have time to think it through. They didn’t have time to consider the unusual behavior of so many ordinary creatures. They simply had to react. Perhaps it was the carrot of Alegni, which Entreri had dangled before Dahlia, but whatever the reason, Drizzt was surprised when the woman splashed up behind him, prodding him and Entreri to move on.

He noted that Entreri crouched and reached into the water and pulled something forth before scrambling to pace him, but took no further note as the three zigzagged their way through a maze of stunned serpents.

Fortunately, the magical energy of Kozah’s Needle had reached far enough along the corridor to get most of the snakes, and they passed beyond that point in short order, and even more fortunately, so they presumed, the corridor widened a bit more, and heightened, and they could press on with more urgency.

Except that they had to wait for a moment as Entreri pulled up to a rock and sat down, and only then did Drizzt understand what the assassin had stopped to retrieve from the water: one of his low boots.

Dahlia’s jolt had lifted him right out of his shoe.

With a few muttered curses and a shake of his head, Entreri pulled the smoking boot back on and stood straight. He looked hard at Dahlia and said, “You owe me a new pair.”

“I saved your life,” she retorted.

“If you had just bothered to join in the fight, it wouldn’t have needed any saving, would it?”

Again Drizzt watched the two and their verbal sparring with something less than amusement, but he couldn’t really focus on it at that moment, because something about their encounter with the bed of serpents was now, in retrospect, truly bothering him.

“Why were all of those snakes exactly the same size?” he asked when they had started on their way again.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Dahlia asked.

“Snakes shed their skins and grow quickly, and continually,” Drizzt explained.

“So they were all the same age,” the elf woman replied, her tone showing that she hardly saw the point of this conversation.

Drizzt shook his head. “Snakes don’t herd.”

“That was a herd of snakes,” Dahlia quickly retorted.

“A bed of snakes,” the ranger corrected, but half-heartedly, for her point was well taken. Drizzt shook his head, not quite accepting it. Snakes did collect in the winter, of course-the drow had found many such dens in his travels, some containing thousands of the creatures. But he had never seen such a hunting pack as they had just encountered, and had never heard of a coordinated snake attack!

“Magically conjured?” Dahlia asked, and that sounded right to Drizzt, until Entreri chimed in.

“Babies.”

“Babies?” Dahlia echoed doubtfully, stating the obvious, for how could a sixfoot snake be a baby?

But it was the way Entreri had said it that had both Drizzt, and Dahlia, despite her argument, turning his way, then following his gaze.

To the mother.

In a small room lit by a single candle, Brother Anthus sat cross-legged on the bare floor. His eyes were closed, his hands resting on the cool stone beside his legs, palms facing upward. Softly, the monk chanted, moaned even, as he focused on his deep inhalation and exhalation, using that rising and falling movement of his belly to clear his swirling thoughts, to find a place of deep peace and emptiness.

This was his only refuge, and even it, at first, seemed not a place of serenity.

Should he travel to Waterdeep and alert the lords that the Netheril Empire was gaining a stronghold just north of them?

Images of that road, fleeting glimpses of the trouble he would have slipping away unnoticed, or of the consequences should Herzgo Alegni’s many soldiers capture him before he got away, assailed him. And if he went, of course, he could not return to Neverwinter unless and until Alegni had been thrown down and the agents of Netheril routed.

One by one, Brother Anthus patted down those thoughts.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

And what of Arunika? Where had the woman found such strength as he had witnessed firsthand at her cottage? How could a small woman survive so casually outside the city walls, anyway? The region was full of wild things, and evil things, coordinated like the Thayans, or rogue bandits, goblinkin, or owlbears.

Brother Anthus saw the image of Arunika and gradually pushed it away.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

What did Herzgo Alegni think of him? Did the warlord even know who he was? And what of Jelvus Grinch-what of value might Anthus bring to Jelvus Grinch to get the man to properly introduce him to the Netherese warlord?

In his mind, Alegni and Grinch stood side by side, smiling back at him, but not a grin of friendship. More likely, he knew, they were mocking him and would allow him no ascent within the ranks of the city, for what of value might he offer, indeed?

But those two, too, receded, pushed back by the deepening emptiness of Brother Anthus.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

And that was all. There was no more. He had chased away the thoughts, the tumult, the uncertainty.

Now he simply was.

An empty vessel, at peace and contented, and the outside world didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter, and didn’t register to him.

Just the rise and fall of his belly, the cool emptiness.

Then he felt the twinge.

It was not a memory, not an internal thought, not a question needing to be answered.

His belly rose softly, and the cool darkness of his mediation saw a flash, a flicker, an intrusion.

Brother Anthus had seen this before, of course, and now he fought hard to maintain his detachment, to mute the noise. This was a state of reception, with his involuntary filters and noise shut down. But it wasn’t that easy, for he had felt this type of twinge before and he knew what it meant, and knew its source, generally, at least.

He had to stay in his purely receptive state to keep hearing it, he knew, but how could he, given the implications that he had heard it at all?

And if he followed that line of reasoning on those implications, and the potential, he would lose it all.

You are deceiving yourself, his thoughts scolded. You want it too badly. But no, it was there, one more time, and he knew what it was. The Sovereignty.

An aboleth!

Brother Anthus’s belly rose and fell more quickly, then, as he began to gasp for breath. His eyes opened wide and he unwound his legs and quickly scrambled to his knees, hands coming before him in a motion of supplication.

Give me this, he silently prayed to his god, for he wanted the Sovereignty back, needed it back.

Mentally he reached out for the signal, but now his thoughts were spinning again, full of implications and possibilities.

Many heartbeats passed, and so desperate was Brother Anthus to hear the creature’s telepathic music once more that he couldn’t even register the pain the stones of the floor were causing to his bony knees.

“Please,” he whispered aloud, then more insistently and loudly, “Please!”

He shook his head vigorously in denial against his growing fear that he had wanted this to happen so badly, he had tricked himself into hearing it. He struggled to his feet, his knees popping, and he staggered stiff-legged for the doorway to exit the small chamber.

He burst out into the temple’s main chapel, holding the door jamb for support, his gaze wildly darting around the dimly candlelit room as if expecting a visitor to be waiting for him.

But it was just him in the chapel. And now, too, it was just him, alone in his thoughts.

Denying that obvious reality, with his eyes wet with tears, Anthus rushed for the outer door. “Please!” he said over and over again, and he stumbled out onto the street, wearing nothing but his loincloth, in the cold air and sparkling stars of a late autumn Neverwinter night.

Brother Anthus wandered the streets aimlessly, begging and pleading, crying and wailing, shaking his fist and shouting of betrayal, and whether out of fear that the man had gone mad, or simply through lack of care, not a shade or a citizen went to retrieve him.

More than once, he thought he heard the sweet sound of an aboleth’s voice again, though it seemed to be about him and not directed at him, and Anthus folded up and fell to his knees once more, right in the middle of a wide, four-way intersection.

Apparently oblivious of his surroundings, of the many curious gazes that came his way, Brother Anthus began to chant.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

“I need more,” Herzgo Alegni implored the red blade. He had felt a sensation, a flicker, a feeling that his assassin was somewhere around, not too far. Claw’s hold on the man known as Barrabus was, in truth, limited, and was curtailed even more by distance. Fortunately for Alegni, the dangerous little man had never caught on to this truth.

In those situations that truly mattered, where Barrabus wanted to strike out against Alegni, Claw was quite effective. It could warn of, and react to, Barrabus the Gray’s strikes before Barrabus the Gray ever made them. The span of time between thinking of a strike and executing it was exceedingly small to an outside observer. But Claw observed from the inside, and those fleeting fractions of a heartbeat were much longer within the universe of thought in which Claw resided.

The sword didn’t answer Alegni’s call just then, and that brought a frown to the hulking tiefling’s red-skinned and devilish face.

“Where is he?” the warlord asked directly. “Where is your slave?”

In reply, the tiefling was given the impression that Barrabus was near, but he felt something else, then, something more.

In the distance, Alegni heard screaming, a desperate plea of “Please!” shouted over and over again in the Neverwinter night. He dismissed it as unimportant- likely one of the new shade soldiers had encountered one of the pathetic citizens, to bad end for the citizen. He focused once more on the red-bladed sword and this other sensation.

There was energy in the air, he understood. Telepathic energy.

Herzgo Alegni leaned back in the chair on his balcony, suddenly concerned. The idea of Barrabus-Artemis Entreri-coming back into the city didn’t bother him at all, even if the man was accompanied by Dahlia and that drow ranger who had joined by her side. To Alegni, they might prove an inconvenience, but more likely an opportunity. Not Dahlia, of course. She would have to be captured and tortured, and likely killed, but as long as he held this sword, Barrabus couldn’t hurt him. Of that Alegni was sure.

But what of this other power? He was sensing it now because Claw was sensing it. What might it be? Who or what was coming to threaten his hold on Neverwinter?

He got nothing more from the sword, then, and eventually gave up and slid the red blade back into its loop on his belt. He considered going to Effron- surely a necromancer would be more attuned to such mystical energies as he had sensed-but only briefly, for how could Alegni be sure that the source of this energy was not the twisted warlock himself?

In the end, the tiefling simply sighed and let it go. He glanced at the decorated pommel of his wondrous sword, and wondered if he had even really sensed something external to Claw at all. Perhaps it had been Claw’s energies, reaching out in search of Barrabus, that he had inadvertently intercepted. He looked out at the wider city, at the multitude of checkpoints and sentry positions he had enacted about Neverwinter. Barrabus and his new friends, if they were indeed Barrabus’s allies, weren’t getting past that wall without Alegni knowing about it.

He scanned the darkened city, eyes roving from firelight to firelight, torch to torch. Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary.

Alegni nodded, satisfied, collected his sword and the boots he had just removed, and went back into his room, hoping to get a half-night’s sleep before the dawn.

The huge serpent, its body as thick as a large man’s chest, lifted its massive head off the floor to stare into the eyes of the three invaders to its sewer realm.

“Fan out,” Drizzt told his companions, Entreri to the right of him, Dahlia to his left. “Widen out. We have to flank that maw.”

He ended with a gasp as the giant snake head snapped at him, lightning fast. His first thought was to block with his blades, but how ridiculous that notion seemed to him in the face of the opened maw, a mouth large enough to swallow him whole, flying at him with the power of a charging horse! Instinct took over and the drow desperately dodged aside, and the air rippled as the snake head snapped past him so powerfully that the shock alone nearly knocked Drizzt from his feet. He held his balance, but the snake recoiled too quickly for the drow to strike it on its retreat.

“We cannot fight that,” Dahlia whispered, and Drizzt caught more than pragmatism in her defeated tone, and when he glanced at the fighter, at this elf who reveled in battle, he saw her arms slipping down helplessly, as if in surrender.

He looked back to the giant snake, to the huge head swerving tantalizingly side to side, to the black eyes looking back at him, looking right through him, mocking him with their power.

Many heartbeats passed. It occurred to Drizzt more than once that Dahlia was correct here, that they couldn’t fight this great creature. The snake was far above them, far too great a foe.

And it didn’t want to kill them.

That truth seemed obvious, and made perfect sense-until Drizzt managed to step back from the obviousness and actually think about it.

Only then did the drow widen his view around the great serpent, to see a half-dozen other people flanking the snake, contentedly.

Contentedly.

There they were, human citizens of Neverwinter, along with a pair of Shadovar, all unarmed and standing beside the serpent as if it was their friend.

Or master.

Drizzt glanced left and right. Dahlia had dropped Kozah’s Needle, and stood shaking her head helplessly, and Entreri, perhaps the most fearless man Drizzt had ever met, a warrior who only got angrier and more ferocious when faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, rolling his sword and dirk nervously and hardly even looking at the giant creature.

Drizzt knew then that there was no need to fight this creature. Indeed, they couldn’t hope to win, or even survive, if they engaged in such a futile battle. Nay, the better course was to simply surrender to its obvious godlike qualities, to accept the reality of their inferiority and live happily beside this living deity.

There would be pleasure and peace.

Drizzt felt his scimitars slipping down by his sides. He was lost. All was lost.

Her thoughts were pried open and flying free.

Dahlia recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before her, this god, understood her. It saw her deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped her naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, she felt… free.

This was no enemy.

This was salvation!

Her pain lay bare before her, the rape, her guilt, her terrifying and evil choice to murder her child, the source of her rage, the multitude of dead lovers-and wouldn’t Drizzt sit atop that pile of corpses?

Or wouldn’t he be strong enough to kill her instead, and free her? That was the point, after all!

But perhaps, she realized now, she didn’t need that extreme, that suicide-bylover approach to ending her pain.

Perhaps the answer was here, before her, within reach, in the dark eyes of this knowing, brilliant creature.

His thoughts were pried open and flying free.

Entreri recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before him, this god, understood him. It saw his deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped him naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, he felt… free.

This was no enemy.

This was salvation!

Entreri, ever guarded, instinctively recoiled, though. How could he not? He, who had lived a life of lies, even from himself, he who had lived in the shadows of fabrication and denial, suddenly found an abrupt reversal-and not just from this creature, as he had with Charon’s Claw, but opened to all within the collective “family” the creature was now offering to him.

His guards went up without a conscious thought to them.

His memories floated before him anyway: the childhood betrayal by his mother, the ultimate betrayal of his uncle and those others, the dirt of Calimport’s streets.

He felt a violation, as he had known as a child, of the most intimate and damaging sort. He faced it again, or tried to, but he realized something… something quite unexpected.

Entreri lost his own contemplations to a moment of surprise, and glanced over at Dahlia, and she at him.

Naked, joined, with no place to hide.

His thoughts were pried open and flying free.

Unlike his companions, though, Drizzt Do’Urden knew this type of intrusion, and recognized almost immediately the subtle trickery, the willing slavery.

During his days wandering the Underdark, after abandoning Menzoberranzan, Drizzt had been seduced in just such a manner-logical promises and wondrous carefree visions of life in Paradise-by the illithids, the wretched mind flayers. Obediently and lovingly, Drizzt and his companions had massaged the hive mind of the illithid community.

He had traveled this same road before, had fallen victim to it, his identity stolen away. Determined never to face such slavery again, Drizzt had trained himself to resist-with a wall of anger. In light of that terrible experience, it wasn’t hard for Drizzt to build that wall once more, almost instantly.

He slowly and subtly reached into his pouch and grasped the onyx figurine, quietly calling for Guenhwyvar, and like his subdued companions, he lowered his blades and began to walk slowly and unthreateningly toward the mesmerizing beast. Every step proved a labor, for the intrusion was strong here, truly powerful. Drizzt had learned painfully how to battle it, and still he doubted he could resist.

Or perhaps even worse, that he could resist without tipping his hand.

He saw the many images floating around him, and had he found a moment free of the demands of discipline, he might have been surprised to glimpse the deep secrets of his companions, particularly those of Dahlia, particularly the one that had him lying dead atop a pile of the corpses of former lovers.

But to go there and take in the view would have meant that his thoughts, too, floated free, and thus, that he, too, would be trapped by the telepathic web.

He stayed behind the wall, strengthened it with every step. He remembered his terrible experience with the illithids. Only one thing had saved him then.

He felt himself beginning to slip, felt the tendrils of another mind, this godlike snake’s mind, reaching into his deepest thoughts.

He thought of Catti-brie and Bruenor, of Belwar and of Clacker, of Zaknafein and of Regis and Wulfgar, of lost friends and those who had given him his identity. This intruder would steal all of his memories, he told himself repeatedly, strengthening the wall of anger.

For without those memories, Drizzt Do’Urden had nothing.

His walk slowed to a halt, his blades dipped because he could not raise them. Out of the periphery of his vision, left and right, he noted that Entreri and Dahlia had begun eyeing him suspiciously, even threateningly.

This deity had recognized his resistance and his deception, he knew, and would turn his own companions upon him.

“No!” Drizzt yelled, one last act of defiance, and he fell back and forced his blades to the ready. Both Dahlia and Entreri turned on him, weapons moving as if to strike, and Drizzt had to face the possibility of killing his lover, and of killing Entreri, this one tie to a past he desperately missed. It all happened so quickly, though, that those thoughts barely registered as anything more than fleeting regrets, and purely on instinct, the drow struck hard, Twinkle backhanding away a stab of Kozah’s Needle, Icingdeath keeping Entreri at bay.

He could win, for they were not fighting as Entreri and Dahlia, but as controlled shells of those magnificent warriors, as mere pawns to the god-snake.

He could not win, he realized immediately after, for in addition to these two, there remained the other slaves, and worse, the giant snake itself, a foe he doubted he could beat.

A foe he knew he could not beat.

A foe so far beyond him that it mocked him for even thinking he could defeat it, or even resist it!

The subtle web closed in as Entreri and Dahlia backed off, and Drizzt lost again, and would be lost, fully so, as he had been to the illithids as a young rogue, a century before.

All the discipline, all the rage, could not win.

Not against a god.

Besides, Drizzt then realized, life would be good in the service of this allknowing creature. Life would be peace and calm and satisfaction in seeing to his master’s needs.

He sighed and let down his guard before the great snake…

He was the first of the slaves to cry out a warning as the black form of Guenhwyvar leaped atop that huge creature. Drizzt shrieked first in outrage and then again in surprise as he saw that the snake wasn’t a snake at all, but a fishlike, horrid looking thing, and how it screamed, both in an audible watery voice and in Drizzt’s mind-so brutally in his mind that it knocked him from his feet, to join Dahlia, Entreri, and the others on the wet floor.

There was a giant snake, lying dead to the side, and this strange creature had taken its identity and place and image. But no more. Guenhwyvar’s attack had stripped away that illusion, leaving a creature that appeared far less formidable.

Drizzt leaped up immediately and charged, pausing only long enough to knock Entreri aside and kick the staff from Dahlia’s hands, for he knew then that he was free, but did not know if the others had broken from their bonds.

Certainly the six slaves who had accompanied this strange creature had not thrown aside their allegiance. A pair of humans scrambled and leaped for Guenhwyvar, who kicked out with a rear claw, driving them both away, cutting one grotesquely, chin to shoulder.

The other four charged past to intercept Drizzt, who spun to his right, coming around to plant the pommel of a scimitar right on the nose of one pursuing man, dropping him in a heap. He didn’t want to kill this group, understanding that they did not act of their own will, but when a shade following that human leaped in with a deadly sword thrust, Drizzt’s instincts had him parrying and responding before he had even realized the instinctive riposte. He did shorten his strike, taking the shade under the ribs but not driving the blade home, but when that didn’t even slow the attacker, who apparently felt no pain in his possessed state, Drizzt had no choice but to strike again, harder and repeatedly.

He had no time to dawdle, and down went the shade, and when the human stubbornly rose against him once more, the drow laid him low by cutting his legs out from under him with a great swipe of his scimitars. He tried not to dig in the blades too deeply, and winced with a bit of regret, but could do little more than that when he saw the blood spilling.

Hoping that he had inflicted no permanent damage, Drizzt joined Guenhwyvar at the aboleth-for indeed, this was one of those strange and little-understood creatures, a young aboleth left behind by the Sovereignty as a sentry and scout for a place they had not abandoned forever.

Drizzt struck hard and he struck fast, and even more so when he rolled around the fishlike beast and caught a glimpse back at his friends. Guenhwyvar’s attack had freed them, and the two of them worked brilliantly and ferociously against the remaining slaves. Drizzt tried to keep his focus on the creature before him. It was physically weak, true, but with the potential to fell him, or paralyze him at least, with one suggestion. He had to keep his mental guards up and had to drive his blades home quickly.

He couldn’t help but grimace when Dahlia, flails spinning in perfect coordination, came face to face with one of the Shadovar slaves. He knew what was coming, and could only look away, renew his focus on the aboleth, as Dahlia’s deadly weapons cracked repeatedly against the slave’s skull, tearing skin and cracking bone, and bashing the shade’s brains to pulp.

Entreri was no more merciful, reminding Drizzt keenly of the true disposition of this man he viewed as a link to his past, shattering any nostalgic notions floated before him by the reappearance of his old nemesis. The drow gasped audibly when Entreri’s sword came right through the torso of one human slave, stabbing out the man’s back. Entreri retracted the blade almost instantly, but fell into a sudden spin that brought it back around and down, across the falling man’s throat.

Even with the threat defeated, the vicious Artemis Entreri could not resist that killing blow.

Too many doubts pressed in on Drizzt then, doubts about his road and his companions, but he pushed them away, even told himself that these were mere implantations by the insidious psychic beast. He turned that disappointment, rage even, into more focused anger on his oppressor, the aboleth.

Down came Twinkle with a smash, crunching bone, and down came a stabbing Icingdeath right behind, plunging through that opening to find the creature’s brain.

Always the brain, the source of the beast’s strength.

Drizzt leaped astride the struggling, flopping creature, alternately plunging his scimitars into the opening, and when one went in deep, the drow turned his wrist and slid it out to the side, left and right, severing the internal connections.

He saw the remaining slave, a Shadovar, rushing at him in a last desperate attempt to save its beloved master.

But too late. Guenhwyvar continued to tear and rend and Drizzt’s blades found their mark.

The aboleth flopped to the stone fully, and lay deathly still.

The approaching Shadovar skidded to a stop and stared at Drizzt in abject confusion, and the drow immediately wondered if he might have found an ally in their quest to get past Alegni’s defenses; he could well understand the profound sense of gratitude anyone in such a state of slavery might feel toward his rescuers.

Before Drizzt could even explore that, though, before he could even further study the Shadovar’s face for hints, he was distracted by a form rushing up from behind the freed slave.

“Dahlia, no!” he shouted, but between his words came the crack of Dahlia’s flail spinning in from the side to cave in the Shadovar’s skull. That powerful strike alone would likely have proven fatal, but Dahlia left little to doubt as she followed with a barrage of heavy blows.

“Did you even pause to consider that he might have supplied us with important information?” Drizzt asked the elf.

Dahlia seemed unimpressed. She looked down at the dead Shadovar and spat on him for effect. “He’s a Netherese dog,” she said, as if that explained everything. “He would have simply lied to us anyway.”

“He might have known Alegni’s defenses,” Drizzt argued. “We do not know how long he was enslaved…”

“What’s done is done,” Entreri said. When Drizzt and Dahlia glanced his way, he motioned to two of the humans, the one Drizzt had dropped and one other. They were both alive, though wounded, but neither injury appeared mortal. A third, too, seemed alive, though her wounds looked far more grievous.

Drizzt pulled off his pack and rushed to the wounded woman first. He produced some bandages and a poultice of mixed and mashed herbs and quickly stemmed the blood flow. As soon as he had the bleeding under control, he looked to his companions, both staring at him incredulously.

“Tend to the others!” he scolded.

“They attacked us,” Dahlia reminded.

“The… that creature attacked us, through them,” Drizzt retorted. “Tend to them!”

Dahlia glanced at Entreri skeptically, and to Drizzt’s dismay, it seemed that Dahlia was being more stubborn and less merciful than Artemis Entreri.

“Tend to them or we-or I-will remain with them,” Drizzt warned, and that broke the stalemate. He threw his pack to Entreri.

Six individuals started along the tunnels a short while later, the two minimally wounded humans, a man and a woman, half-carrying, half-dragging their other female companion in a makeshift litter Drizzt had constructed from a cloak and the bones of the fishlike creature that had enslaved them. They were citizens of Neverwinter, or had been.

“I was raised outside of Luskan,” the woman, Genevieve by name, explained to Drizzt as they walked. “My family farmed there.”

She went on to describe the fall of that region, but Drizzt already knew the sad tale well.

“Did you know a family Stuyles?” he asked.

“Aye, the name sounds familiar,” Genevieve replied. “But ’twas a long time ago. I been here many years. Before the ruin.”

“But you survived,” Drizzt said, and he looked to Entreri as he did, and the assassin wore an expression of interest, at least.

“We all did,” the man on the other side of the litter replied. “Because of that thing back there.”

“Aye, we been down here for years and years,” Genevieve added. She winced and seemed quite pained as she tried to sort it all out. “A couple of times after the ruin, we went up. To spy, I expect, though I hardly remember it.”

“Seems like you’d make a fine spy, then,” Entreri said sarcastically.

“Was the fish creature looking through us,” she explained. “Oh, but it could do that. It could do almost anything.”

“Killed the great snake and controlled her brood with little trouble,” the man added.

“They were babies, then,” Drizzt remarked, and he shuddered to think that Neverwinter’s sewer might soon be home to a thriving community of gigantic constrictors! He left the trio, then, to rejoin his companions at the lead.

Drizzt wanted to speak with Entreri on that journey, to help him to recognize the intrusion for what it was, to learn from the dominance of the aboleth so that he might use those lessons as he tried to resist any such dominance from his old sword. But the drow found that he couldn’t talk to the man at that time, or to Dahlia, and he quickly fell back, following the three wounded humans, helping them where he could, while Entreri and Dahlia led the way, the assassin once more holding half of Dahlia’s staff to ward against any unwanted intrusions. They didn’t need Twinkle’s glow any longer, for the sun was rising outside, and peeking in at enough junctures-through cracks up above, or grates-to provide enough light for the two, with their lowlight vision, to navigate.

They chatted as they walked, and Drizzt could catch only bits and pieces of their conversation, which frustrated him even more. After only a few twists and turns in the sewer, even those pieces of conversation were lost to him, drowned out by the sound of flowing water, for they were then paralleling the river, very nearby.

Still he watched them, feeling very distant to them, so suddenly.

Feeling very lost.

“Soon,” Entreri whispered to Dahlia, up in front of the others.

Dahlia looked at him curiously, not quite understanding. Was he talking about them getting out of the sewers soon? Perhaps, but she suspected something more, particularly given the strange intermingling of personal secrets.

Entreri nodded, and there was so much in that simple gesture, a recognition of things far deeper than the practical implications of the single word he had spoken.

“Soon,” he was saying, meaning that Dahlia would find a proper resolution “soon.”

“Soon,” he was saying, as if to indicate that some moment of peace was “soon” before her.

“Soon.” He was hinting, Dahlia understood, that the resolution of her greatest tragedy and greatest moment…

The elf warrior looked away, not willing to let him see the moisture in her blue eyes, not willing to let this stranger, this former, and perhaps still, adversary, look into her soul yet again.

Or was it just shame?